


It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

by orphan_account



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Comic Book Violence, Hate at First Sight, M/M, Meet-Ugly, Post-Apocalypse, Radiation zombies, Rating May Change, Slow Burn, ryan and jen as bros, shane and sara as platonic best friends
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-04-16 10:58:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14163357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: two years after the apocalypse, in the wasteland, they meet.





	1. Eve Of Destruction

**Author's Note:**

> baby's first multichapter fic!!!! I am so excited for this, strap in kids it's gonna be a wild ride. this chapter is v short because it's a prologue rather than part of the story, future chapters will be longer!!

“Fuck, there’s no signal down here,” Shane grumbled as he held his phone above his head, which was pretty damn high — if he couldn’t get any reception at higher than six foot four, this was a lost cause.   
  
“I mean, this is a bunker,” his coworker and best friend laughed at him. “did you expect wi-fi down here?”   
  
Shane just rolled his eyes at her. Sara was one of the only people who could match his snark, and lucky for him, they worked across the hall from each other; him buried in history books, her covered in paint teaching art. She was also usually down for pretty much any weird stuff Shane wanted to do, which apparently included spending the night in a working bunker for research purposes and general nerding out.  
  
“At least we have beer and I’ve got my notes, I guess.” He sat down on the worn out couch that rested on the south wall.   
  
“What, my company isn’t entertaining enough for you?”   
  
“You know it is, otherwise I wouldn’t have brought you to spend the night here.”   
  
“Touché,” she said while opening a beer bottle and handing it to Shane before opening her own.   
  
Shane thanked her, then started telling the story of the bunker they were in; with the main room and one bedroom, it followed the standard layout for bunkers built for middle-class families in the 20th century. It wasn’t in use anymore, its only purpose now a museum show, but the decoration was still there and functional for the most part, including supplies, a radio, and a couple of Haz-Mat suits. He was scoping it out for his students, his status as a teacher allowing him to stay the night out of hours, and it was oddly calm, really.   
  
They sat on the couch drinking their beer and making dumb jokes about bunkers as Sara sketched the room around them, colouring in the few pops of red around the room with her watercolour. It was, overall, a relaxed, laid-back evening, and Shane enjoyed it; past the initial annoyance over his phone not working here, he found being isolated from the world peaceful. 

  
  
__________

   
  
Ryan had gotten to his dad’s bunker after finishing work, intent on getting the electricity to work again, and he’d achieved it, but it had exhausted him. Besides, the pullout couch had an awfully comfy blanket on it, and dozing off for a bit wouldn’t hurt.   
  
He’d inherited this bunker after his dad’s passing, and he cherished it; he’d been there a few times as a kid to repair some of the equipment in it with his old man and had developed a love for conspiracies and other theories that way. Now it had been his for a couple years, and a few hints of his father remained here and there — a few baseball hats, posters for baseball games from the nineties, and a photo of his mom he’d taken when they were young on pinned on the fridge.   
  
A loud bang in the distance woke him from his nap, and he jolted awake; he’d slept for an hour according to his phone, and he could hear more explosions faintly, above ground, but he couldn’t be sure. Could this be...? No, it couldn’t be. He would have seen it coming and made good on his promise to bring his mom and brother down here to safety.   
  


__________

  
  
“Fuck, did you hear that?” Sara stood up, looking up at the bunker’s high ceiling.  
  
“It’s probably just some fireworks or some shit,” Shane set his beer on the floor, calmly.   
  
“Shane, we’re so deep below ground I don’t think we’d hear fireworks.”   
  
The slow look of realisation set in on their faces. 

  
  
__________

  
About three miles away from each other, in two different bunkers, Shane and Ryan both said “well, fuck” at the exact same time. 


	2. World Gone Mad

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eight hundred and eighty-one days after the bomb, Ryan encounters a stranger.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I forgot to mention it in the prologue but I made a playlist for this fic, and each chapter is named after a song which you can listen to while you read to set the mood if you like. [Click here!](https://open.spotify.com/user/7qrsnfjavg54xcm4pp6iret5v/playlist/0IrKPoi3VDOq1rPIVxydDj?si=TuaIyo8OQ0qrTtM6gfQobg)

Ryan sighs as he goes through a previously unopened box of meds and supplements in the abandoned pharmacy he made his way to today; there’s not much for him to take there, just a couple protein shakes that might come in handy when he’s out scavenging. Now, two years after it had all gone to shit and nuclear bombs rained on the world, you have to go further and further into the wasteland if you want to find anything worth taking; it takes more and more walking on barren land to turn up more than junk.

And really, he knows he should be thankful— years of careful planning have left him with a neatly calculated stock of non-perishable food that should last about four to five more years, give or take. Some people weren’t so lucky when the apocalypse happened. Still, whenever he finds himself in a new area, there’s this tiny glimmer of hope inside that he might find something new, something worthwhile that will make his days a little less bleak. What he discovers when he straightens back up and turns around upon hearing a shuffling noise is the complete opposite of that.

A person, wearing an older-looking Haz-Mat suit, is hunched over his backpack, and, well, scavenging it.

“Step the fuck away,” he asks, gun already in hand. It’s a habit he’s formed from being out there; keep a hand on supplies, but most importantly, always be ready to have a hand on your gun.

Whoever was rummaging through his possessions just a second ago straightens back up, hands in the air.

“Wow, little guy, slow down,” says a deep voice. “I didn’t know the owner was still around.” Ryan can’t see the shit-eating grin under the Haz-Mat suit, but he can hear it, and it’s more than enough to infuriate him.

“I was literally standing right there,” he snarls.

The guy shrugs, not looking nearly bothered enough by the fact there’s a 9mm gun pointed at him. He’s taller than Ryan by a good handful of inches, towering over him in the run-down, blown up building, and Ryan decides right there and then he fucking hates him. Who the hell is so chill and carefree in the apocalyptic badlands?

“Good day to you too, sir,” the stranger tells him, and then, because he wasn’t infuriating enough, he fucking _bows_ before he walks out the door _._

“Asshole,” Ryan swears under his breath.

He checks his bag and sure enough, nothing’s missing. It’s not like there was a lot in there to begin with anyway; just a swiss army knife, some bandages, strong tape to patch up his mask god forbid it gets a hole, and a protein bar. It’s a worn-out denim bag he refuses to throw away; he tells himself that maybe if he holds on to things from his life _before_ , he can keep some of his sanity.

Ryan bags the protein shakes he found, shoulders his bag, and then he’s on his way back. _That’s enough interaction with strangers for today_ , he thinks.

The walk back to the bunker he’s called home for eight hundred and eighty-one days is eerily calm, but that’s common these days. The wasteland stretches on as far as the eye can see, only peppered with a few desolate constructions in the distance. It’s quiet today, and the annoying stranger with an unnervingly smooth voice he almost shot dead is nowhere to be seen, which he’s thankful for. If it weren’t for the mutated vegetation in the radiated soil and his gas mask, this would almost feel like a normal walk through a modern ghost town, and Ryan lives for those moments; he lives for the times he catches a glimpse of normality before he remembers the reality he’s condemned to, the horror and the apocalypse.

 

_____________________

 

Somewhere, a couple miles north (northeast if you’re pretentious), a stranger takes off his Haz-Mat suit with a sly smile on his face. Underneath, he’s wearing a faded denim jacket with a button badge on the right pocket depicting a rainbow.

He crosses the threshold into the non-contaminated, safe part of the bunker, and the smell of paint is what hits his nostrils first.

“Any luck today?” a female voice sounds from the corner of the room, where the owner sits cross-legged, painting a design on the wall intently.

“Nope,” he answers, slumping down on the same worn out couch he’d sat in when he heard the first sign of the end of the world. “how’s the epic hot dog mural coming along?” “It’s practically the Sistine Chapel,” she gestures to her work, both dry and fresh paint, depicting various humanoid-looking hot dog characters, a can of soup, and a hologram. “Sara Rubin, the apocalypse’s Michelangelo,” he says in a put-on pretentious art critic voice.

“Shut up, Shane.”

He smiles again before he gets up to pad into the small bedroom they share together; it’s only one double bed, and he’s gotten used to the familiar weight of his platonic apocalypse partner next to him, breathing loud in the night while he snores. Shane thinks if he were alone he might have gone crazy by now, and Sara agrees. Sometimes, when times get especially lonely, she’ll sleep on his chest and he’ll wrap his arms around her, two orphans of the storm in an underground bunker. When those nights happen, he wonders if, without the bomb, they’d have ever gotten their shit together and dated, maybe even gotten married with little curly-haired kids running around; but that future went away the second the first bomb hit Los Angeles.

Shane pulls his t-shirt over his head and catches himself in the mirror before he puts a clean one back on; he hasn’t shaven in a few weeks, and he’s lost a little bit of weight lately, but he looks just the same as he did _before_ , save for the scar running along his chest, from his right collarbone to the left of his stomach. It’s white now, contrasting faintly against his pale skin. If he ran his fingers along it, he’d be retracing the way the blade had slashed his skin, not deep enough to kill, but bad enough to wound, when the man they’d taken in a few months after the bomb happened tried to rob them and take all their supplies. He’d pulled a knife on Sara when she was sleeping, and Shane had stepped in, taking the knife, but not before the guy had been able to get him. If he can ever feel himself get soft, a short look at the mark is enough of a reminder to not let his guard down.

 

___________________

 

As it turns out, letting his guard down is exactly what Ryan is presently doing. He’s almost done walking back home when a mutated, green hand threatens to grab his ankle, which he fails to notice because he’s too busy fidgeting with his gun; he only hears the sound of a baseball bat hitting what’s left of the rotten body before it falls to the ground with a thump.

“Dude,” a chipper, feminine voice says from behind him, “that was so close!”

“Not my fault,” he argues as he turns around to face the short-haired woman he lives with. “I met a real fucking tall asshole today and it’s distracted me.”

She rolls her eyes, which he can’t see under the mask, but he can almost hear. Jen, like always, sees right through him. It’s not the first time she’s had to save his ass from one of the zombies that now inhabit the wasteland; Ryan tends to be in his own head, gone god knows where way too often.

“You find anything at that library of yours?”

“Yeah, a couple books, but then it got overrun with the good old mutated ghouls and I had to leave,” she explains. “It’s a good thing I got back before you and decided to wait for you or you’d have been toast, buddy.”

“Don’t underestimate my reflexes in dangerous times.”

She shakes her head and they fall into step. The sun is setting over the nuclear wasteland as they head back “home”, and for the first time in months, Ryan met someone new. He can’t decide if that fact has him more annoyed or intrigued.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading as always, your feedback means the world to me and I'd love to know what you think and if you want to read more of this <3


	3. Wasteland

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shane hears an interesting radio broadcast. Meanwhile, Ryan goes out into the wasteland to find a certain thing he needs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back at it again!! You can find the mood song for this chapter on [the playlist here](https://open.spotify.com/user/7qrsnfjavg54xcm4pp6iret5v/playlist/0IrKPoi3VDOq1rPIVxydDj?si=MfnfEkRhT5mM6CYC3atLIA).

  
When he hears it, Shane’s sitting at the makeshift radio area in the main room of their bunker. It doesn’t have much; just a pen paper, some radio instruction from before the bomb, and a microphone to accompany the radio. He’s formed a habit of tinkering with the radio absentmindedly a few times a week now – at the start, they’d often hear broadcasts by people asking for help or saying they had things to trade, but these days, the radio is mostly quiet and filled with white noise. Still, he checks. He’s not sure what he’s looking for, tuning the frequency back and forth while Sara sits a few feet from him painting over her chainsaw, but he looks, and that’s when he finally hears it.

  
A voice, impossible to mistake for anything else, starts crackling on around the 90.3 frequency.

  
“ _…join the Last Pale Light In The West today. We have shelter, self-sufficient crops preserved from before the bomb, and enough room and supplies for you and your loved ones. Our coordinates are 38°44′32.91″ north, 104°50′54.40″west. I repeat, our coordinates are 38°44′32.91″ north, 104°50′54.40″ west. You are not alone. 38°44′32.91″ north, 104°50′54.40″west._ ”

  
Then the signal is gone, and Shane squints before he glances over at Sara, searching for a reaction.

  
“Is that a cult? It sounds like one,” she says almost on cue, not looking up from where the paintbrush is creating swirling patterns on the chainsaw handle.

  
“Could be, or maybe their food has gone scarce and they’re looking for people to eat.”

  
Sara looks up then, with a sly grin on her face that absolutely matches Shane’s. “Better not show up there, then. They could feed five people off the meat on your legs alone.”

  
Shane lets out a hearty laugh. She does have a point.

  
______________

 

  
“… _38_ _°44′32.91″ north, 104°50′54.40″_ _west._ ”

  
Ryan scrambles to find a pen and paper and write down the coordinates. His radio is a more advanced one and scans for signals all day, picking up various frequencies people put out there, and this the first time he’s heard something so…intriguing.

  
“Why do these sound so fucking familiar?” he mumbles to himself as he opens a cardboard box labelled Relevant Places he had stashed under the radio area before the bomb, filled with coordinates and maps for places he might want to investigate or turn to.

  
Ryan had been so meticulous. He’d planned it all, prepared for the end, put away some of his salary to buy supplies like his dad had advised him to, even if people around him found it a little odd, and yet, the end had still happened and taken it all from him. In the California home he’d grown up in, complete with a reinforced basement in case his family couldn’t get to the bunker in time, he’d left a working radio for his loved ones to contact him with in case something happened, but now it’s been eight hundred and ninety days, and every time he tries to radio in, he’s met with only white noise. A hopeless white noise that stinks of death.

  
He finally finds what he’s looking for after rummaging for a minute: a poster depicting an imposing mountain painted in shades of grey and blue, cut wide open by a tunnel dug deep into its gut, sporting a sign that reads “Cheyenne Mountain Complex” in formal, imposing white letters.

  
The back of the poster, written in Ryan’s father’s handwriting, reads:

  
“ _38° 44′ 32.91″ N,_ _104° 50′ 54.4″ W_ ”

  
Ryan stands there for a moment, holding the poster in two almost shaky hands. He’d considered it, all these months ago, going to the complex the army built deep in the mountain to withstand anything that might happen to the world, but without the certainty that the people there might welcome him if they were even alive, he hadn’t pursued it. It seemed too big a risk at the time, to give up everything he had here and travel a thousand miles for possibly nothing.

  
But now, with the information that they’re happy to share and welcome anyone that might turn up at their door, he wonders.

  
He glances at his desk in the other corner of the room, littered with so many papers covered in research that the old, washed out wood isn’t even visible anymore, and it hits him how much more equipment they probably have on the mountain, how much more he could discover about the grotesque zombies that haunt the wasteland.

  
Ryan hasn’t shared his research with anyone but Jen, but since he started studying them, he’s made a number of discoveries; the biggest one being that there isn’t just one type of creature wandering about. Most people either run and hide when they spot one or kill it instantly, but Ryan had strategically been watching them for months, only killing them when his safety had been compromised. His problem now, though, is that he doesn’t have any scientific equipment or a safe hazard-free lab to study samples.

There’s a moment in every person’s life where they just think _fuck it_ and something snaps in them, sets them in motion to go for it, and this is Ryan’s.

 

______________________

 

“So, what do you think?” he asks Jen later, after putting together a makeshift board with a map, the poster he found earlier, and a circle around where the coordinates lead.

“I mean, I think it sounds awesome, but it’s a thousand miles away, Ryan.” she shuffles from one foot to the other, looking unsure.

“Okay, so suppose I could find a vehicle. Would you be with me?”

“You know I would if you did.”

Ryan nods then, an excited smile on his lips. He’s grateful for Jen being his partner in crime; he’d been alone for a year until he heard a man crying one day while was scavenging an abandoned apartment block. Jen was hunched over him, both of them in older, less good suits than him. It turns out the guy—her older brother, as it turned out— was dying, having been scratched by one of the zombies. He begged Ryan to look after her, and Ryan has since. It’s unspoken between the two of them, but he knows she feels as if she owes him a debt; what she doesn’t know is Ryan feels just as indebted to her for being by his side.

 

______________________

 

The next morning, Ryan goes out into the wasteland, and he feels good for the first time in months; he finally has a clear goal that isn’t just gathering some data or finding some random supplies. He knows that, a few miles north of where they are, a car park stands still, full of abandoned cars no one’s coming back for, and he’s going to scope it out, perhaps come back with Jen later so they can pick a vehicle to drive.

There’s a smile on his face and maybe even a spring in his step as he walks, looking at his map and compass to make sure he’s going in the right direction. The concrete under his feet is busted, hints of dead vegetation breaking through, and he’s grown used to walking around the holes— in this world, you can’t really afford to trip.

He comes to a halt and almost does trip, though, when he distinguishes a shape just a few steps ahead of him, looking familiar with its lanky height. _Oh, hell no,_ he thinks.

“You!” he says pointedly as he approaches the annoyingly tall man until he’s standing only a step away from him.

“Hey, angry little guy, what’s up?”

Ryan audibly groans at the question. “None of your goddamn fucking business.”

“Not gonna point a gun in my face this time? I have to say I’m disappointed.”

“Despite how much I want to, I only threaten people when they actually deserve it, and besides, you’d like that way too much, so no.”

“Maybe,” the stranger admits as he steps closer to him, annoyingly close now, so close he can see his eyes through the glass of his mask. “wanna find out?”

Ryan looks up into his eyes — like really looks, for the first time — and he hates how intense of a look this tall drifter is giving him, even through tinted, two-inch thick glass, but he doesn’t want to lower his gaze first; something about this guy brings out the competitive side of him, the side he thought buried in the sand.

“Move, you pair of fucking idiots!” is the phrase that brings him back to earth; they scramble to look away, and Ryan’s eyes widen. All around them are about four or five undead creatures, threatening to scratch them at any moment, and he curses under his breath. He was so caught up in a staring contest, he didn’t notice them creeping in. Rookie fucking mistake.

Ryan scrambles for his gun, and from the corner of his eye, he can see the stranger doing the same. He doesn’t even have time to fire a single gunshot, though, before they’re all chopped in half with a whirring sound.

“What were you two even doing? Too busy flirting to pay attention?” Past the original rush of adrenaline, he now notices that a feminine voice is speaking; it’s pointed, tinted with a layer of amusement — just like the tall stranger’s. Ryan hates the idea that there could be two of them.

“Fuck no, he just got in my way,” says the guy, and that nearly makes Ryan jump out of his skin.

“You’re the one who fucking— you stepped into _my_ space!”

“Whatever,” she shrugs. “And I don’t know you, but you’re welcome, by the way.”

It suddenly strikes Ryan that this woman, even if she might be friends with what is seemingly the most annoying man in the wasteland, just saved his life, and he should thank her; many people these days could have easily let him die just to scavenge his corpse.

“Would you, uh— would you like to come back to my place for drinks? So I can thank you, I mean. Nothing creepy.”

 

______________________

 

Sara tilts her head towards Shane, who’s still standing behind the shorter man who just invited her over. He shrugs and gestures to his gun, which is short for _we’re both armed, it should be fine_.

“..sure, but he’s coming too. I’m Sara, by the way,” she offers a bloody, gloved hand.

“I’m Ryan,” he tells her as he shakes her hand. “And you are?”

“Shane. I would have told you that earlier, but you know. Zombies.”

“Whatever,” Ryan shrugs. “It’s this way.”

 

______________________

 

The first thing that strikes Ryan when Shane takes off his mask is how unnervingly _nice_ his features are, and how his beard hugs his long face. The second thing is how Shane looks at him with a faint squint, as if he’s studying him, eyes boring into him.

“What are you looking at?” Ryan asks.

“To quote what someone said to me earlier, none of your goddamn fucking business,” he smiles.

Shane’s definitely not looking at Ryan’s arms in his white t-shirt and thinking it’s a shame they belong to someone who can’t stand him.

**Author's Note:**

> comments make my actual life, let me know if you want to read more of this!! thank you for reading <3


End file.
